Comment: Big data can’t beat an agent’s instinct

The latest is ‘big data’, the true meaning and significance of which is the subject of much fevered debate among the self?appointed online technocrati.

As with many buzzwords, you might conclude it covers anything from mere common business sense to something so complex that it needs a small army of boffins to implement.

So it’s good to see Abta’s Travel Convention next month will offer firms more useful insight into what PwC calls ‘a second age of enlightenment’.

Let’s face it, what firm wouldn’t want to have more useful data about its customers? Is there any marketing manager who doesn’t want to zero in on exactly the right customers, with exactly the right offers at exactly the right time?

Proper analysis of this data using sophisticated computer systems is opening this up as a genuine opportunity.

But I’d throw in a word of caution. Apple’s Steve Jobs famously never did any consumer research before coming up with the iPod. So, don’t fall into the trap of thinking an algorithm is the answer to all your prayers, or forget that travel is one of those industries in which instinct and experience are still hugely valuable.

Our Travel Weekly readers are real people, each of whom possesses their own data-processing capabilities more sophisticated than any man-made machine. And they actually talk to clients, listen and respond. Long may that continue.